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Hello, I am looking to understand what is the difference between VM and LXC Containers?
Everything I read sounds a little abstract and the end result seems to be the same.
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Virtual Machine
A Virtual Machine (VM) consists of running several complete Operating Systems (Oses) (Linux, Windows, BSD, ...) on shared hardware resources. Such Oses may be different in each VM and may also be different from the base operating system where they run Vms. Each virtualized OS kernel considers its execution on a common hardware, either generic or a specific hypervisor driver.
Containers LXC
Containers are resource isolation: processes, file system, network interfaces and other kernel resources (shared memory, mutexes, traffic lights, ...) running within an operating system, with some limitations (CPU, memory, iops). Containers are commonly described as "chroot on Steroids". Freebsd jails or Solaris Zones/containers have the same goal.
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Vms technology, as the name says, simulates a physical machine for the OS installed on it. It allows you to install any OS inside it, independent of the host’s OS. Containers, like Docker, create isolated environments within the same OS.
It is possible to use a Windows VM on a linux system and vice versa. With Docker this is not possible. (Except by running Docker within a VM).
Creating a VM requires an image that includes OS+applicativos, which usually has hundreds of Mbs. On Docker, the environment can be created with smaller files as they don’t need to have all the OS.
The boot time of a VM is similar to connecting a server, while a container can go up in seconds.
Docker allows you to share the host’s RAM while each running VM allocates a portion of the memory to you, making it impossible to run multiple Vms simultaneously on a desktop, for example.
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